At approximately 2:50 pm yesterday, April 15, bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Many were injured; three died. I stood in the little room we call my office, just off the kitchen, an hour before I was to leave for the Monday night workshop, watching the coverage. It brought back memories of watching news footage of other tragedies in April, particularly the shootings at Virginia Tech, my alma mater, which occurred on April 16, 2007, and which had already been on my mind.

I wondered whether the prompts and poems I had chosen for that night’s workshop would be appropriate, under the circumstances. I recalled some words from Pat Schneider’s book Writing Alone and With Others (Oxford University Press) about trusting the group’s energy. I decided to let people choose for themselves whether to talk or write about what had happened, and proceeded with my prepared materials.

We opened with e.e. cummings’ poem “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” then I handed out, face down, photos from Christopher Payne’s gorgeous book, Asylum, and offered the following invitation: When you’re ready, turn the picture over. Notice where your eyes go first, and use that detail as the way into a piece of writing.

When I turned my own photo over, I was at first disappointed to see the sweep of a marble staircase, a stunning image, but one I have seen many times and written about before. Where was the surprise in that? But I allowed myself to stay with what my eyes went to first, and this is what I wrote.

***

Light enters through the large window at the back and to one side of the room, beneath the arches, past the broken tile. Enters? No, it gambols, it bursts, it sings without words: yes, worlds decay and people die, but I still shine; even when you cannot see me, I am here. Cloud cover merely hides me from your sight but have faith, I shine still behind the gray.

I shine on days of celebration and sadness, oversee triumph and tragedy both.

I was at Waco, in Oklahoma City, at Columbine and Virginia Tech, tragedies of Aprils past, and whether you could feel my warmth or not, whether I appeared robust or sickly, I was in Boston today.

You live because because I exist.

Because I exist, there are plants to eat, plants to feed the animals that labor and the ones that feed you, there is warmth enough that nearly every corner of this blue and green planet is home to some of your brethren. And that is true regardless of the actions of one or more of your brethren–someone who, despite ideology or religion or disregard for human life, breathes the same air, basks in the same rays you feel upon your own skin.

So it is, so it has always been, so it will always be.

I have seen it all: there is nothing new. Only the actors change; only different are the names on the lists, each slotted almost randomly into one of those discrete categories: survivors, victims, perpetrators.

I? I am the silent, omnipresent witness, and I can change nothing.

Sunset Coast Writers will offer a two-day writing retreat on April 27 and 28 at St. Rita’s Garden in the Duneland Beach area of Michigan City, Indiana. Each day will be divided between generating new writing, following the Amherst Writers and Artists’ method as described by Pat Schneider in Writing Alone and With Others, and working on individual projects. Located less than a mile from Lake Michigan, St. Rita’s Garden offers both shared and private writing spaces. $150. Lunch and a light breakfast provided. For more information, visit the workshops page or email sunsetcoastwriters@gmail.com.

For this exercise, we each made a list, quickly, of things we are grateful for, trying not to censor ourselves but to write whatever came to mind. We then chose three to share with the group. (If we liked something offered by another writer, we could add it to our own lists.) Then we wrote, using items from the list. Here are some of mine: my husband, clean sheets, Lake Michigan, a hot shower, a car that runs.

***

The blessing of clean sheets. Someone said that to me recently: the blessing of clean sheets.

I love the smooth, cool feel of clean sheets, particularly when I have just showered. They feel, then, like forgiveness, like starting over, like possibility–but I had never thought to call them a blessing. Or to consider just how much goes into their preparation: there is the water of Lake Michigan, processed through the treatment plant below the bluff and the hands and minds of those who staff it, the hearts that keep them going; the pipes that run from the plant to my home a mile away, so that I can push a button on my washing machine to start a cycle rather than having to tote a pail that same mile; I appreciate the washer itself, a faux Maytag that replaced the text model of the first Neptune (i.e., the first front-loader, to the uninitiated) that I wouldn’t give up until it did, and the company that employed my husband for thirteen years and the company that brought us to this home a mile from Lake Michigan and the water that comes from it; detergent, developed, refined, and produced by the good people at Proctor & Gamble and sold in the clean and bright Martin’s (Martin’s Supermarket, count on us!; gasoline and money to buy it and a car that runs, traffic lights that allow me to turn left onto Washington and then Niles on my way home; and mostly, John, who always knows which is the short side of the fitted sheet, the hands that lift and tuck and straighten, and the years that make the task familiar.

A new year, a new session of workshops. Seems like a good time to revive this blog, which languished throughout the fall.

In the workshops I lead, as in all workshops based on the Amherst Writers & Artists method, we write in response to exercises and prompts. These prompts are suggestions, invitations. Writers are free to interpret them however they want, and they are free–nay, encouraged–to ignore them completely when there is something else they want or need to write. At the end of our writing time, we share what we have written. It is an honor and a privilege to receive these just-written words, and to say that I am sometimes moved to laughter or tears is neither exaggeration nor cliche’.

I continue to be amazed at the depth of emotion and the beauty of the language that emerges from ten or fifteen or twenty minutes of writing. My own efforts are often poor things in comparison, but I offer a few of them here, along with the exercises or prompts that inspired them.

***

Our very first exercise of 2012: Boiling it Down to the Essence.

It works like this:

1. Make a list of the things (people, possessions, abstractions) important to you. From these, choose the 9 most important and write each one on a slip of paper.
2. Give up 3 of them. Tear them up, throw them away. You can’t have them anymore.
3. Once you’ve given up 3, give up two more. Put those in the trash, too. They’re no longer available to you.
4. Give up one more.

Some versions of this exercise require people to get down to one slip of paper: to the thing that, beyond any other, they cannot live without, but I allow us to hold on to 3.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? They’re just pieces of paper; we’re not really giving up our families, our independence, peace, or eyesight. But I challenge you to do it, particularly with a group of people, which keeps you honest, makes you list the things that really matter, makes you feel the wrench of choosing one important thing or person over another.

I’m not going to tell you what was on my list, or share what survived the final cut, but here, with only the editing that occurs when something handwritten is typed, is what I wrote.

He Ain’t Heavy

It has been said (perhaps by Gloria Steinem, perhaps by the ubiquitous “Anonymous”) that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. True: a woman shouldn’t need a man to complete her. But what if that man is her brother? What if she doesn’t remember a life that didn’t include him? There are pictures of me in the eighteen months before his birth: an infant in my mother’s arms; gazing in wonder at my second Christmas tree; sitting in the grass of the backyard of the house on Ohio, holding my pudgy arms up as someone off-camera says, “Big girl! Who’s a big girl?”

Although I have no memory of this and although, of course, black-and-white photographs have no accompanying audio, I know this to be so, know it from the separate accounts of my mother and much-older sister, accounts that for once match and so must be true. “Big girl!” But to me, I was never a big girl until I was a big sister. Not until Bryan appears in the photos do they feel like me.

We were Susie-and-Bryan and then Bryan-and-Barbara. Look-alikes, though we couldn’t see it. Not yin and yang, not peas in a pod. Just…there. Together. In front of the house in Georgia on the day we moved in and the grass on the back hill was as tall as Dad. At Disney World. Standing next to Dad’s 1965 Dodge, the one he drove until he bought one of those “Japanese cars” (a Toyota Corona) in 1971. (Bryan and I stood next to that one, too.)  Scrunched into the orange chair in our Detroit living room, on Santa’s lap, in the aisle of a Grant’s store so Mom could check the flash.

My favorite: our faces scrunched up, cheeks pressed together, made up for Halloween in 1983. Me as a student from the Art Institute of Atlanta in clashing colors and blaring make-up, him as a tourist with sunglasses, camera, and Noskote. I had just come home for the weekend from Atlanta, where I was attending paralegal school. We’d been apart for four weeks, our longest separation. Our only real separation at that point. Arms around each other, we are grinning madly.

I don’t know where that picture is.

We fought a lot growing up. We argued a lot even as “grown-up” twenty-somethings. Everyone in the community theatre we belonged to then will tell you that. But on the night before I left for Atlanta, after going out with friends, while we stood in the Pizza Inn parking lot on the corner of Depot Street and North Franklin, he said, for the first time without being forced or prompted by our parents, “I love you.”

There’s no photo to accompany that moment, but it’s one I won’t misplace.

Last week’s prompt was to write from random given words. The challenge of weaving three seemingly-unconnected words into one piece of writing is a good warm-up, and fun, but it can also lead a writer in directions she or he would never have traveled.  This week’s prompt asks you to take elements from your own writing and weave them into a new piece.

Return to three randomly-chosen pieces written before today.  From each, take one of the following:

1) central theme or idea
2) a line of dialogue
3) an image
4) a character

I chose:

• The image of the pool from The Bide-A-Wee
  (original prompt: begin with the words “It was one of those hotels…”)

• central theme: frustration
  (original prompt: list of all the swear words and phrases you can think of. This was a group exercise. After we made our own lists, we each chose three to share with the group, and used one or more of the words/phrases is a piece of writing. I decided not to post that particular bit of writing as it began “Bleep it all to bleep bleep-ing bleep,” but it was great fun to write, and even more fun to hear what others had written.)

• There was no dialogue in the pieces I chose, so I used the phrase “weaving their stories into our skin”
  (original prompt: write a reverse poem)

At the top of a clean piece of paper I wrote:

weaving their stories into our skins
3′ deep scum-covered leaf-lined bone-dry pool
frustration

As soon as I wrote “frustration,” Janice Lee and Dwayne popped into my head, and I knew I had to continue their story, which I had begun in the previous week’s workshop. There was no pre-planning–those phrases brought situation and characters to mind. (The following does contain some profanity, but it’s pretty mild compared to what made it into the original profanity piece.)

***

The house was not a total loss, but the water damage was extensive. A thick streak of oily black smut climbed upwards from the microwave that Dwayne had set on fire. The Butter Cream Frosting paint, so cheery when applied just a week ago–now hung from the kitchen cabinets in sticky strips. Janice Lee’s Jimmy Choo’s–likewise new–squelched when she trudged down the soggy hallway to the bedroom, where she sighed and pulled a suitcase from the closet. It still held her toiletries and blow dryer; she and Dwayne had only been home from Panama City for two days.

“Why the hell he couldn’t have pulled this shit before we spent the settlement money fixing up the house I am sure I do not know,” she said.

“This shit” was putting a bag of U-Save Extra Extra Butter popcorn in the microwave and then, when the bag didn’t pouf up quite the way he liked it, restarting it.

“I told him we didn’t need to buy that generic crap anymore.” She yanked a drawer open, began tossing panties into the suitcase. “I told him that shit wouldn’t pop.”

It had not. Not even when Dwayne had punched in 30 minutes rather than 30 seconds and then walked into the bathroom to–as he put it–water the horses. No, the popcorn had not popped but it had–thanks to the extra extra greasy butter–ignited. Before Janice Lee could stop him, Dwayne had called 911, the fire department, the Goochland County Sheriff’s department. (He was a fast dialer, and Janice Lee had been a little busy unplugging the microwave and, once the flames died down, removing the stinking bag from it.)

She shoved a couple of bras and camisoles on top of the panties. Dwayne was out talking to the firemen. She knew she should be supervising him–Lord knew what he’d tell them–but right now she was just too damn tired.

After the firemen left, after Dwayne had tried to leave the house without a suitcase–he had actually looked hurt when he said, “Aw, Janice Lee, I though you’d a packed for me”–and after they had climbed into the dealer’s car they had been driving since the settlement check arrived, Janice Lee drove them to the Bide-A-Wee, Fluvanna’s only motel.

Against her better judgement–she was still too tired–Janice Lee waited in the Lexus while Dwayne went in to rent a room. She rested her head against the car window and stared at the neon pink letters that spelled out “Poo” and reflected murkily on the two inches of water at the bottom of the 3-foot-deep scum-covered, leaf-lined pool. She remembered her favorite English professor, Thaddeus Miller, rakishly-long hair tucked behind his ears, leaning back on the teacher’s desk, eyes closed, reciting one of his own poems.

We all live with the scars we choose
They define us, confine us
Weave their stories into our skin.

“They sure do, ” Janice Lee thought, “they surely do.”

Note:  The line “we all live with the scars we choose” comes from the song “Take Me as I Am,” written by Jennifer Nettles, Jeffrey Cohen, and Kristian Bush.

Use one or more of the following in a piece of writing: popcorn, bathroom, mechanic.

***

The smell of burnt popcorn flooded out of the house when Janice Lee opened the front door. “Good God Almighty, Dwayne,” she yelled, “what in the hell are you doing?” She tossed her briefcase onto the love seat and headed for the smoky kitchen.

Her husband’s silhouette appeared. “It’s okay, Janice Lee. I called the mechanic.”

“The mechanic? What in blue blazes for?”

“In case there’s something wrong with the micro–”

The smoke detector screeched into belated awareness.

“Oh, Lordy.”  Dwayne ran from the kitchen.

Flames danced behind the microwave’s glass door. Columns of smoke escaped from the vents on either side. Janice Lee grabbed a dishtowel and yanked the big cord from the outlet. Coughing, she pushed open the kitchen window and ran to open the back door.  ”Dwayne, where the hell are you?”

The flames had disappeared but the smoke detector wailed on. “Dwayne, can’t you turn that damn thing off?”

Dwayne appeared in the doorway, arms wet to the elbow. “It’s all right, Janice Lee. I’m running water in the bathtub, ‘case we need to take shelter from the fire.”

“Lord God,” Janice Lee said, “I married an idiot. Get me a chair, Dwayne. Somebody’s gotta get the battery out of that thing.”

For a recent workshop session, I borrowed parts of the opening lines from several of the essays in David Sedaris‘ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Little, Brown 2004). “Chicken in the Henhouse begins, “It was one of those hotels without room service, the type you wouldn’t mind if you were paying your own bill but would complain about if someone else was paying.” I invited writers to begin with the words “It was one of those of those hotels…”

***

It was one of those motels with a scum-covered, leaf-lined, 3-foot-deep bone-dry pool out front.  Aluminum lawn chairs with missing panels still gathered around it, as if hoping for a return to the glory days of motor lodges, those days when Mom and Dad and Junior and Sissy would stop after a long day of touring Yellowstone or Gettysburg, Mom’s hair as tall as a haystack and stiff as meringue, due more to Aqua Net than the flimsy chiffon she had tied over it. Junior and Sissy would fling their bathing suits on–plaid drawstring shorts for Junior, polka dots and ruffles for Sissy–jam their white middles into plastic swim rings and jump into a cloud of watery chlorine that reddened their eyes and made their noses drip, while Mom said you kids stop running and Dad said you kids listen to your mother, and I’m going to ask the manager where the nearest HoJo’s is and Mom sat reading True Confessions, a lipstick-smudged cigarette burning in the glass ashtray that said “Bide-A-Wee for a Small Fee” in gold letters.

The ashtrays were gone long before anyone believed the Surgeon General, and so were the round plastic tables adorned with burn marks and coffee rings, and families never stopped at the Bide-A-Wee anymore, not even to ask about the nearest Cracker Barrel. The sign out front still advertised the pool, but kids had spray painted over the “L” and so now it just read “Poo.”  A pale Plymouth Horizon, which looked like it might have been some cheerful color when new–Robin’s Egg or Cobalt–sat a few yards from the door marked “Office” like an asthmatic waiting to catch its breath before going on. White curtains sagged nearly closed in every window and Laurie thought she had never seen anyplace so lonely in all her life.

In a Sunset Coast Writers workshop, I invite writers to use the prompts in whatever way they wish–they can even ignore the prompt if there’s something else they want or need to write, and I do the same. Sometimes, however, for whatever reason–my mood, the temperature of the room, the phase of the moon–absolutely nothing comes to mind. When that happens, I will write about not writing, or about how stupid the exercise is and whose idea was it, anyway? (Mine.)  I encourage the other writers to do the same thing. (Sometimes the prompts really are stupid, or fall into the category of “tried it, hated it, never gonna do it again.”)

Often, they won’t want to read that piece aloud because it’s “a mess,” “a hodgepodge,” “a muddle,” but when they do, more often than not it’s a gem, like this poem by Kathy Stady, a member of the Monday night group. (Thanks for reading, Kathy.)

Sunset Coast Writers

in the mood
or not
time to write
says she
words spill
20 minutes
any place, any one
flowing craft
thoughts, words, sounds play
critique-free
or not
says me

-Kathy Stady (Used with permission.)

The prompt: From imagination, or memory, or both, write about a sound.

***

The day my mother died, it was the sound of her not-breathing that most struck me. With each breath, her chest rose, air moving through her throat, raspy, painful, like wind through wooden blinds. So much work. The air gargled its way out of her lungs through the mouth she could no longer close. Then, silence. The only sounds our almost-contained cries, our own inhaled efforts to be strong, the shuffle of shoes on linoleum as we shifted, wondering, believing there would be no more breath. We perched on the edge of grief and relief, the words it’s over, thank God it’s over just awaiting permission to form. Then: A gasp, lungs fighting to remain necessary despite it all, despite us, the silence between breaths growing until they seemed not to come from the same person. In. Out. So much work.